“Most of the organizations that I teach don’t feel that they are running a social club, and that adjective actually turns them off,” McAfee tells Federal News Radio. These tools are about empowering people, not getting them out of the way, he said, so there is a social aspect to them, but the term just doesn’t end up being helpful.

Too often, we think about e-mail as a our collaboration tool, McAfee notes — and as I have written about, The First Step Toward Collaboration Is to Stop E-Mailing. But these collaboration tools are very different — information sharing is the reason they were created. It isn’t an afterthought.

There has been an extensive discussion about this subject online. Tomorrow, we’ll cull some of that discussion.